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A Last Man Off the Bench Rides a Blog to Stardom

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As a second grader, when the Ohio State basketball player Mark Titus wrote a poem for Mother’s Day, he decided to needle his mom with a precocious show of sarcasm. “My mother needs NordicTrack, she wears XXL, she needs to call 1-800-94-JENNY,” he wrote, mortifying his teacher.

But when the teacher called home to Laura Titus about her son’s “inappropriate behavior,” Mom just laughed. “I just thought, that’s Mark,” she said.

Titus is smart enough that he was recruited to play basketball at Harvard and missed one question on the math section of the SAT. He is bizarre enough that he spent spring break of his senior year of high school attending WrestleMania XXII dressed up, with his best friend, Andy Keller, as the 1980s tag-team duo the Rockers. They also attended a live taping of Jerry Springer’s talk show.

Those smarts and verve have helped make Titus one of the popular players in college basketball, a mind-boggling anomaly given that he is a little-used walk-on with a career high of 3 points.

He is so popular that student sections in opposing arenas hold up signs and chant his name, and the Ohio State star Evan Turner admits that Titus is the most popular player on the team.

“I still remember vividly the day I had 500 total blog hits,” Titus said over breakfast recently. “To me, that was a huge deal. I never could have dreamed it would be like it is now.”

A trillion is basketball slang for a player entering the game and not recording any statistic other than minutes. That leaves the box score with 12 zeros, or a trillion, and Titus’s followers are known as the Trillion Man March. (People have actually booed him for getting a rebound and ruining his potential trillion.)

“Ultimately, I think of myself as an entertainer, which is kind of a dumb word,” he said, typical of his relentless self-deprecation. “I think it’s more entertainment than it is writing. It’s certainly not journalism.”

Titus also pokes relentless fun at Turner, Ohio State’s biggest star, who is nicknamed the Villain. From a recent Tweet: “Kid high fived The Villain and said ‘I’m never washing my hand again,’ which is funny cause if I high 5 him I can’t wash my hand soon enough.”

Turner, like the rest of Titus’s teammates and targets, embraces the blog. “He’s really made the most out of nothing,” Turner said.

What has made Titus so popular? He theorizes that his everyman qualities appeal to bench warmers in sports and in life. The tipping point for traffic came when the ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons had him as a guest on a podcast. Simmons said he was hooked after reading the “Love in an Elevator” post, in which Titus wrote about being trapped in the elevator: “I bring up the idea of cannibalism and ask for a volunteer to be the first to be eaten. No takers.”

Titus credits Ohio State Coach Thad Matta for letting him write the blog, which many coaches would never allow. A few times, the Ohio State compliance office has asked him remove things like his former teammate B. J. Mullens’s grade point average.

Matta admits to essentially being computer illiterate and said he had never read the blog. He does have a strong affinity for Titus and his dry sense of humor, he said. He trusts him not to cross any lines.

Titus started off as a manager for the Buckeyes but quit after a few weeks of filling water bottles. Matta jokes that Titus filmed practice as poorly as anyone in team history. But with a shortage of bodies a few weeks later, Titus was asked to join the team.

That started a ride that has seen the Final Four in 2007 with Titus’s summer basketball teammates Greg Oden, Mike Conley and Daequan Cook, a National Invitation Tournament title and, last year, a first-round exit.

Matta’s favorite moment came seconds before tip-off of the championship game of the N.C.A.A. tournament in 2007.

Photo

Mark Titus, second from left, rarely plays in Ohio State's games, but students in opposing arenas often chant his name.Credit
Greg Sailor for The New York Times

“For what it’s worth,” Matta recalled Titus telling him as the starters took the floor, “I got five fouls to give.” Titus then pointed at the end of the bench and said, “I’ll be right down here if you need me.”

Matta cracks up while recalling the story. “It was good for me then; I needed it,” he said.

The junior guard Jon Diebler said that after a win on a recent Saturday night, Matta gathered the team to talk about an e-mail message that had been circulating about a huge party featuring the football and basketball teams.

With numerous administrators in the locker room, Titus interjected straight-faced before Matta could warn the team not to attend. “Coach,” he said. “Can you forward a copy of that e-mail to me? I never got it.”

The assistant Jeff Boals said that Titus was at the scorer’s table during a blowout this year and retreated to the bench without entering the game at a timeout. He immediately screamed to the managers: “Water! Water! I need water!”

“He knows the line, he’ll walk it and lean over it and then pull himself back,” said Joshua Kendrick, who coached Titus at Brownsburg (Ind.) High School. Kendrick recalled often feeling torn, saying, “Mark, you can’t, but that’s really funny.”

For his plans after graduation, he has pondered everything from acting to scripts. He promises the blog could become juicier when he is not bound by the N.C.A.A.’s or Ohio State’s rules.

Titus joked that before he became known as a blogger, he was “that guy with Greg Oden.” He grew up with Oden, hung out with him while Oden was a campus rock star and said that there were some great untold stories from the Final Four year. He has pondered a book.

“I think that’s what everyone is scared of, is that the day we lose in the N.C.A.A. tournament or win the national championship or whatever,” he said. “I get turned loose and can do what I want.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2009, on page SP5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bench Warmer Rides a Blog and an Attitude to Stardom. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe